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Posited: faculty offices are detrimental to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

At Google, everyone sits out in the open at clusters of desks (not cubicles, God no). It looks a little something like this:

(This appears to be a picture from Google's Kirkland, WA office, but we have a similar setup in Cambridge.) Today I swung by Harvard to my big, empty office, which looks like this:

Of course, it's an awesome office, one of the most spacious that I've seen in an academic CS building. You could easily pack eight grad students in there, sitting on top of a large pile of undergrads. I got to thinking. In most academic settings, faculty are isolated in their own separate offices -- isolated from one another, from the students, from the rest of the world. This can't possibly be good for cross-fertilization of ideas. Although I leave my office door open whenever I'm there, people hardly ever drop by -- I guess I am pretty intimidating. (Or maybe it's my ferocious gua…

I keep bumping into references online to my PhD thesis work on the Staged Event-Driven Architecture, or SEDA. I thought this had been long forgotten, but I guess not. It's been about 10 years since I did the bulk of that work (the major paper was published in SOSP 2001), so I thought it would be interesting to think back on what we got right and what we got wrong. Just to summarize, SEDA is a design for highly-concurrent servers based on a hybrid of event-driven and thread-driven concurrency. The idea is to break the server logic into a series of stages connected with queues; each stage has a (small and dynamically-sized) thread pool to process incoming events, and passes events to other stages. The advantages of the design include modularity, the ability to scale to large numbers of concurrent requests, and (most importantly, I think) explicit control of overload, through the queues. Apparently quite a few systems have been influenced by SEDA, including some major components that …

My little boy, Sidney, turned a year old this past week. I've been reflecting a lot lately on how much my life has changed since having a baby. I've also met a bunch of junior faculty members who ask what it's like trying to juggle being a prof with being a parent. To be sure, I was pretty worried that it would be really hard to juggle my work responsibilities with having a kid. At first I screwed up royally, but now I've found a good balance and it really works. Best of all, I love being a dad -- it has been worth all the sleepless nights, cleaning up barf and poop, and learning how to steer a spoonful of beets into an unwilling mouth.

Of course, being a dad is totally different than being a mom, and I can't imagine how much harder it must be for women in academia who want to have children. My wife is also in an academic career. When Sidney was first born, she took 3 months off of work, but this was hard for both of us -- for her, because she never got a break fro…

I've often said that one of the best things about being at Harvard is the students. The undergrads in particular are really out-of-this-world, needle-goes-to-eleven, scary smart. (There's no way I would have ever managed to get into Harvard as an undergrad.) I also love getting undergrads involved in research, and have had some great experiences. Some of my former students have gone off to do PhDs at Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, off to medical and business school, to work at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Others have started little companies, like Facebook. I'm really proud of the students that have passed through my research lab and my classes.

But the batch of undergrads I'm working with this summer are off the charts in so many ways. I'm so excited about what they're doing I feel like I have to brag a little.

One thing that you rarely learn before starting a faculty job is how much work goes into managing a research group. During my pre-tenure days, this meant squeezing the most productivity out of my students and making sure they were hitting on all cylinders. Now that I have tenure, my role is more like a bodhisattva -- simply to make sure that my students (and postdocs and research staff) are successful in whatever they do. Of course, productivity and success have a high degree of overlap, but they are not exactly the same thing. There are many subtle things that one needs to know to make sure that a research group is functioning properly. A lot of it has to do with making sure that the personalities mesh well. For a while, I tried to get all of my students to work together on One Big Project. We would have these big group meetings and write design docs but over time it became clear to me that it just wasn't working. It finally dawned on me that a couple of the students in my group (…

I started work at Google this week, and did orientation at the mothership in Mountain View. It was an awesome experience, and I had more fun than I have had in years. I certainly learned a hell of a lot. A bunch of "Nooglers" -- more than 100! -- were starting the same week, including Amin Vahdat, who is taking a sabbatical there as well. I've been asked a lot what I will be working on a Google. I can't provide details, but my job is a software engineer doing networking-related projects out of Google's Boston office. I won't be doing "research"; I'll be building and deploying real systems. I'm very excited.

Clearly, I haven't been there long enough to have any informed opinions on the place, but first impressions are important -- so here goes.

First, it should be no surprise that I'm blown away by the scale of the problems that Google is working on and the resources they bring to bear on those problems. Before last week, the largest …